Earnings manipulation has become a widespread practice for US corporations. However, most studies in the literature focus on whether certain incentives would facilitate managers to manipulate earnings and there has been little evidence documenting the consequences of earnings manipulation. This...

Most agree that value-relevance and timeliness are two important and desirable attributes of financial information. In this study, we examine the value-relevance and timeliness of financial information under different information regimes: distinct trading mechanisms and different levels of...

We use pension asset allocation data to examine the relation between the expected long-term rate of return (ERR) on pension assets and the amount of funds allocated by fund managers to equity securities. If firms use their best estimate of the ERR, then cross-sectional differences in the ERR...

This study explains the cross-sectional variation in firms' selected assumptions (discount rates and health care cost trend rates) used to measure the obligation for post-retirement benefits other than pensions (PRB) under SFAS No. 106. Our aim is to examine whether managements manger the...

This study uses SFAS No. 106 disclosures to investigate the abilities of post-retirement benefit (PRB) liability components, and annual PRB cost components to explain cross-sectional variation in market-to-book ratios. SFAS No. 106 requires disclosure of the sensitivity of the PRB liability and...

We identify and test motives for corporate pension asset allocations using a proprietary asset allocation database covering the 1988-1994 period. We focus on the question of whether the recognition of additional minimum pension liability in accordance with SFAS No. 87 affects asset allocation....

Prior literature shows government corruption mostly hurts poorer economies, whereas recent events, including the 2008 US economic crisis, suggest business corruption may harm growth in wealthier economies. Using multi-national surveys in which citizens communicated their perceptions of...

We examine whether the mandatory adoption of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) has changed the usefulness of accounting information in predicting future earnings and cash flows out-of-sample. Using a sample of firms from European Union countries that mandatorily adopted IFRS in...

We investigate whether and how the information content of reported profitability and macroeconomic expectations changes when the state of the economy changes from non-crisis to crisis conditions. For this, we analyze data from sixteen European countries over the period 2005-2015. We find...